James Agee was an eclectic writer, shifting easily among fiction, documentary prose, movie criticism, and screenwriting. His talents ultimately won him a Pulitzer prize in 1958 for A Death in the Family and an Academy award nomination in 1951 for The African Queen. But he died in relative obscurity, not living long enough to enjoy the fruits of his efforts. His screenplay with John Huston for the movie classic The African Queen was filmed on location in Africa without him, for he suffered the first of a series of heart attacks in 1951 and was too weak to make the trip. He died at the age of forty-five before his adaptation of The Night of the Hunter, a movie acclaimed by critics such as Kenneth Seib as "perhaps one of the two or three finest 'horror' movies produced in the last two decades," was released in 1955. Two years after Agee's death...